Seeing red

Like almost (but apparently not quite) half of the voting public, I feel Charlie Brown-ish right now. Optimistically ignorant of American democracy, we somehow just knew Lucy would let us kick the ball this time. "AAARRRRRGGGHHHH!!!"

I stayed up past 4 a.m., following the elections to their Gore-y end. Tasked with dropping 500 words on the subject, I realized, around 2 a.m. or so, that what I had would not work. I'd taken a blog-like approach, chronicling my reactions to the Super Bowl of politics like the big game that it is. This time there were no nipples. Unfortunately, though, a lot of people ended up assed-out. My immediate thoughts upon this realization are, for matters of decorum, unpublishable.

But now it's morning in America, again, and still I type. Let the Wednesday morning quarterbacking commence. Right now, it's about all that those of us in the "reality-based community" have.

The Youth, as it turned out, didn't really turn out in significantly greater numbers than in prior elections--certainly not in large enough droves to counter Rove's machinations. As early as midday on Tuesday I read anecdotes of kids rocking "Vote Or Die" T-shirts, yet not voting. Puffy's mindless hyperbole may yet prove prescient when the draft comes rolling around to stock the frontlines for our next big misadventure.

Where my cell phone people at? Apparently, not behind that preposition. Nor behind the proposition that a new, stealthy and powerful demographic was waiting in the wings to defy conventional wisdom and give lie to the polls that stubbornly told us that the U.S. was still "slightly Bush" country.

We've been saying for how long that folks need to learn Spanish? It seems that Latinos constituted a good percentage of the first-time voters. The hidden significance there is that, even in voting roughly 50-50, they likely skewed expectations and projections by the Dems, who operate under the assumption that minorities and new voters lean heavily Democratic. It was a politically fatal miscalculation.

And we cannot forget Christian fundamentalists, who've been re-branded of late as the much more benign sounding "evangelicals." The root of evangelical, of course, is evangelize--to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In one of the sublime ironies of our age, these folks seemingly spend most of their time in the Old Testament, apparently enamored with all the smiting parts. Gay marriage trumps unrepentant liars, murderers and thieves in the new moral calculus. The many Biblical admonitions to care for widows and orphans go completely unheeded under this administration, as do Jesus' repeated warnings regarding the prospects of the rich and greedy to enter the kingdom of heaven.

It would be decidedly unChristian of me to wish upon Bush voters that their children be sent to Iraq and Iran to fight the American jihad for tax cuts and oil at the calculated behest of this most false of prophets. But that's where we're headed. Unless we quickly convince some electors that Bush is the Antichrist.